Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar: Canadian Light

For Philippe Falardeau, the schoolyard is “a microcosm of society where everything happens.” The Canadian-born director has chosen this familiar setting for his most recent film, Monsieur Lazhar, an Oscar-nominated drama about an Algerian refugee who joins the faculty at a Canadian school recently rocked by tragedy. We might attribute Falardeau’s critical success to a laid-back persona juxtaposed against an aggressive, hands-on directorial approach. However, a commitment to good, strong narrative and an acute understanding of childhood (which translates into an acute understanding of adulthood) makes Falardeau a rising auteur with unlimited possibilities.

“You win 10 points for pronouncing that right,” says Philippe Falardeau. “Évelyne de la Chenelière,” is the effectively pronounced name spoken at the beginning of our conversation in Midtown Manhattan’s Regency Hotel. It seems appropriate to start with the playwright whose one-man play (Bashir Lazhar) was the inspiration for the film. Chenelière even has a small role in the film, playing the mother of a student who develops a close bond with Monsieur Lazhar. In one of the film’s final scenes, “Alice’s mother” shares the screen with Lazhar (played by Mohamed Fellag).

“Évelyne is thanking her own creation, actually,” Falardeau says, smiling excitedly, as if the scene is taking place right here in the hotel’s New Yorker Room. “She’s the only character who thanks Monsieur Lazhar for what he did with the children.” He goes on to say that, although she did not co-write the script with him, Chenelière read every version of it. “I asked her to be the guardian of her own characters.”

An interesting word choice—“guardian”—for much of the film centers around a teacher who takes on a similar role. While Falardeau wanted the characters to maintain certain original elements, he also wanted—and needed—to expound upon the play. “The main challenge was that the play was very poetic. You have this one man onstage talking to people who aren’t there. As an audience, you would try to imagine the other characters, and it was very abstract, but very beautiful. But as a screenwriter, I was dealing with very concrete things: people, children, desks, a hanging person in the class. These things had to feel real. I had to install some kind of dramatic tension. When you look at the film, nothing much is happening in terms of events. It’s quite uneventful. So you need some kind of dramatic tension in the beginning that will sustain your interest until the final burst at the end.”

Falardeau speaks truthfully about his fourth feature film; there are no emu-induced car wrecks or patent-thieving men with diamonds lodged behind their pupils, like in his second feature, Congorama. But the subject matter of Monsieur Lazhar does quite enough to inspire and sustain the intensity of the piece, whose primary concern might be death and the wreckage a single death may leave behind. I saw the film as a critique of a certain societal taboo some have against death and the deceased (especially open discourse on either), but Falardeau explains that the taboo really pertains to children. “We tend to dismiss the capacity of children to talk about and be interested in difficult issues.”

Monsieur Lazhar’s release comes at an interesting time, given the recent MPAA rating controversy over the documentary Bully. The adults in Falardeau’s film, who refuse to speak plainly with the children about the violent death of their previous teacher, reflect a pervasive communal fear. But “sheltering” children from an unpleasant reality may only prove to be more detrimental than the thing itself. “We’re letting rules and regulations get in the way of the conversation,” Falardeau opines. “Everyone agrees that we should talk about it, but no one does because there’s a protocol, and that’s the mistake!”

Monsieur Lazhar also expresses concern over policies that determine how we can relate to a child. Teachers at the Canadian school where the story is set cannot touch the children—no hitting, no hugging. Asked if things have gone too far, Falardeau answers with an emphatic “yes!” In our conversation and in the film, he paints our society as one where children are ignored on many levels. They are not treated as intelligent beings with valuable opinions, nor are they completely allowed to be vulnerable people in need of affection.

Falardeau’s directorial style reflects these philosophies, especially in his work with the young cast members. Whenever the children needed a break on set, he was keen on a good soccer game to relax and re-energize them. “It’s like a summer camp!” he laughs. “And when you do things like that, they have fun, and they actually trust you.” Such trust resulted in strong, moving performances from the two students whose stories became central to the plot, Sophie Nélisse and Émilien Néron.

These breaks were likely all the more valuable given the tone of the film, which Falardeau admits is “pretty dark.” To provide some counterbalance to this tone for the audience—who don’t have soccer game intermissions available to them—Falardeau tried to imbue most scenes with a luminous quality. “We were shooting—almost always—towards the window,” he says. Falardeau describes the music as quite bright, as well: “It’s Mozart and Scarlatti and my friend Martin Leon’s music. I wanted to use these cinematographic tools to pull the film towards the light.”

As a result, the film is not without its lighthearted moments. “It’s rare that drama occurs over and over again without humor,” Falardeau says. “Life is not like that. I try to have both occur simultaneously in my films.” Casting Mohamed Fellag as Bachir Lazhar proved to be a good move in this direction, especially as the Algerian comedian had his own personal experience with immigration upon which to draw. Although Falardeau had his reservations about casting the somewhat clunky actor, ultimately he was moved by Fellag’s interest in the story (he had previously given a reading of the stage play), and he “trusted Mohamed’s intimate experience with the exile.”

And now, viewers are convinced that Philipe Falardeau can be trusted to aptly reimagine and relay their most intimate experiences from the playground. For Monsieur Lazhar really is a film about children—children as they are and children as we choose to see them. Falardeau says that he’s always been “obsessed with the question of identity—individual and collective,” and as children, nearly all of us begin forming notions of identity in the schoolyard. Falardeau’s work allows us to revisit ourselves through the point of view of children, and also from the perspective of an immigrant, an outsider who—like many of us—has a past that utterly defines him even though it is one to which he can never really return.

“I still want to talk about everything!” says Falardeau, referring back to his own past and his genesis as a director. The difference, he says, between then and now (or between the director of Congorama and the director of Monsieur Lazhar) is that “this time I didn’t rely on clever twists in the script. It was a risk, but I tackled emotion in a much more frontal way. I knew that the success of the film depended on my ability do deal with the emotional scenes.”

Having conquered his own fear of being “melodramatic,” Falardeau has created a pitch-perfect film, as appropriately sentimental as it is clever. In Monsieur Lazhar, viewers reenter the classrooms in which, as children, they learned and experienced politics, bureaucracy, ethnicity and, sometimes, grief. These are subjects that almost always require a refresher course. With Monsieur Lazhar, Philippe Falardeau takes us all to school.